Mexico: OTT subs to hit 5m by year-end

Dataxis, the intelligence company on the Latin American TV market, forecasts that Mexico will reach 5 million VoD OTT subscribers by end 2015, largely surpassing Brazil, Colombia and Argentina. Mexico has the most developed IP and TV everywhere multiscreen television platforms and the highest investment of the region.

According to Dataxis, OTT subscribers – like Netflix and Clarovideo – and movies rentals and purchases added together, Mexico online video services market will reach $370 million in 2015 and up to $809 million in 2018, which represent the biggest market in Latin America. Mexico is the only country of the region where pay-TV operators succeeded in splitting premium TV everywhere services (such as Dish online or Sky Bluetogo Video Everywhere) and billing them separately something that was never achieved by companies in other Latin American markets.

Mexico’s Clarovideo is the Latin American OTT company that produces the largest amount of original content, similar to Nexflix in the US. Morover, the Clarovideo and Telmex broadband package has brought a growth of almost half million in trimestral subscribers during the first half of the year. At the beginning of January, Netflix had a 64 per cent market share and Clarovideo 32 per cent. At the end of June, the Slim’s company had reached a 39,7 per cent market share while the American company fell to 55.7 per cent.

The cut-throat competition in the broadband market is one of the drivers of the new TV services on Internet. According to Dataxis estimates, Mexico had 14 millions broadband connexions at the end of June. Following important acquisitions that occurred in the Cable TV market, Grupo Televisa is now the second player with 16.4 per cent of the accesses, including all Televisa Telecom operators. Telmex subscribers has decreased from 70 per cent market share at the beginning of 2014, to 63.4 per cent in 2015.